Review Horizon

Not too long after Windows Vista’s fiasco, continually decreasing relevancy of its Windows Mobile platform and Internet Explorer’s market share dropping rapidly, everybody started to wonder if Microsoft finally lost its way. Its searching engine rapidly losing market share against Google,  together with a corporate image that seemed to discard innovation and originality in favor of …well, I am not sure in favor of what since Microsoft’s most revenue comes from Windows and Office while still losing money almost everywhere else, even in the Entertainment division which was arguable successful through its XBOX 360 sales.

Of course, a company culture that pushes innovation somewhere behind and instead concentrates on marketing, sales, stability and so on is expected to appear in a company as big as Microsoft, but especially in the software industry, it doesn’t take long for the competition to surface. As opposed to manufacturing industry for example, in software you can still have ideas in a garage and became wildly successful, with Google and Facebook being just the two most well known examples.

However, lately Microsoft tries to redefine its image by rolling announcement after announcement. And I am talking about Windows 7, Project Natal, Continue Reading →

The gaming blog Joystiq posted some really interesting news. It looks that, coming with the 2010 Spring update Xbox 360 will support USB storage devices working as regular Xbox 360 internal hard-drive or those super-expensive memory units. The capacity limit seems to be limited at 16GB per piece and you can have two of these at most. So 32GB is not bad, considering many(including myself) still have the 20GB version, or even the Arcade model.

However one question remains…why artificially limited to 16GB Microsoft? You just can’t help yourself, can you?

See more at Joystiq.

I promised to blog about my HTPC software configuration, so here it is:

As we all know, nothing works anymore without software, as buggy and inefficient some of it it.  But I am here now, to talk a little bit about that software used specifically for entertainment. I was always a fan of Windows Media Center, starting with its earliest incarnations inside Windows XP, but we have come a long way since then…not necessarily in terms of what is offered out of the box (although Netflix and Internet TV integration are something to write home about), but especially in terms of plug-ins.

Talking about plug-ins, as a personal opinion, we would see way more if Microsoft would move their corporate might and create a Marketplace for Media Center, but it may be that WMC did not penetrate in terms of usage as much as an iPhone would do, and probably never will. It is just us, the technology aficionados…

OK, enough ranting. I will start by saying that I don’t use WMC for watching TV, so no TV tuners are involved. For TV, I have a VIP 722 Dish Network DVR that serves me well. And, when VIP 922 will come, I will get that as well. My current software configuration is oriented around consuming the media I already have (my legal purchased DVDs stored on a server for convenience), my music, family movies and pictures and access to any media available online (HULU, YouTube and Netflix mostly). Lately, I found WMC plug-ins to access Facebook pictures as well, so life is pretty good.

Here is a brief description:

Operating System – Windows 7 Home Premium, 32bit. The reason for choosing 32bit instead of 64bit is due to compatibility issues many of the plug-ins still have with 32bit. Because I don’t have that much time to tinker around, I choose the safe path.

Windows 7 Codecs – Windows 7 codec pack offered by Shark007. Nothing else! Shark007 covers everything I need in terms of codecs, from DIVX to MKV containers with H264 and DTS, including the dreaded MOV format from some of the current digital cameras. I never found any format that this plug-in pack won’t play. Alternative hardware accelerated (DXVA) H264 codecs are also provided to be used by all players.

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Media aggregator – mediabrowser is by far the best (in my opinion) plugin for WMC. It takes your recorded, digital or ripped media and presents it in several absolutely Continue Reading →

Today, the federal government released a huge plan to accelerate Internet access in 100 millions households.

As we well know, in terms of broadband access, US is behind many other countries from Asia and Europe.  Conform with a report commissioned by the Communications Workers of America, it looks like the median downloading speed in US is around 2.3mbps while the upload is 435kbps. The median download speeds in Korea (the South one of course, the other one still uses smoke signals) for example seems to be around 49mbps. In Europe, particularly well seem to be doing Finland and France with 9 respectively 7 times faster speeds than US users.

Some of the goals underlined in this plan are:
· Connect 100 million households to affordable 100-megabits-per-second service.

· Affordable access in every American community to ultra-high-speed broadband of at
least 1 gigabit per second at anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals, and military
installations.
· Ensure that the United States is leading the world in mobile innovation by making 500
megahertz of spectrum newly available for licensed and unlicensed use.
· Move our adoption rates from roughly 65 percent to more than 90 percent and make sure
that every child in America is digitally literate by the time he or she leaves high school.
· Bring affordable broadband to rural communities, schools, libraries, and vulnerable
populations by transitioning existing Universal Service Fund support from yesterday’s
analog technologies to tomorrow’s digital infrastructure.

Now, everything sounds nice and fancy, and our mouths are watering while we imagine all this, but  FCC never makes it very clear just WHO will pay for everything…As we know, the Big Telcos are busy testing various plans to cap internet usage. We’ll just have to wait, see  and most important, HOPE!

Update: It looks like some of the costs will come from selling 500 megahertz of newly available spectrum for broadband.

Intro:

Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock…except the Philips NP1100/37 is not merely a clock even if it looks like one. And if the mouse keeps running away, we’ll conclude that he’s a low-tech mouse with no love for gadgets (and for some weird reason, I remembered that the French translate all the tech words including mouse)

Well, before I bought the Aluratek internet radio for my bedroom, I actually got my appetite opened up by Philips NP1100/37. The long, pompous and official title is “Philips NP1100/37 Streamium Network Music Player with 3.0″ B&W Display” and it is exactly that. It streams music from the internet via the included Rhapsody music service (subscription required). It also streams music from any DLNA server on your network (Windows Media Player is one example, PS3 media server is another one). It also does a glorious job at streaming internet radio stations (over 10,000 at the last count). All these might features come with a puny little remote control. But we’ll talk later about that. Let’s get into some details. Continue Reading →